Wednesday, December 22, 2010

"piRAWnha is the first RAW image developer for the iPad. In piRAWnha, the raw data can be edited and once the settings have been optimized, a high‐quality JPEG image file can be exported to the Photo Library. Currently, piRAWnha supports raw images transferred to the iPad with the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit. piRAWnha works with all raw files supported by Apple."

The iPad's IPS screen makes it a natural fit in the photographer's bag. Upon the iPad's announcement most photographers saw its potential as a portable electronic portfolio. Others have since used it for a second monitor for photo editing on the notebook while out in the field. Now there is an app to process raw images on the iPad. Besides the awful pun, I am just curious if anyone would really want to use the iPad to process anywhere from 12 megapixel to 24 megapixel raw images.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

"We invite you to participate in the ACDSee Pro 4 public Beta program and have your say in the development of the next version of ACDSee Pro, the software application that helps professional and advanced amateur photographers accelerate their workflow from beginning to end. Preview Pro 4's improved metadata management, enhanced processing technology that will bring out the best in your RAW and other image files, and the new Map feature that allows you to add location information to photos, and view photos by location."

Like beta testing? Have a bunch of photos you'd like to work with? Then the ACDSee Pro 4 beta might be just the ticket. They're adding some interesting new features, including mapping, enhanced metadata management, and better raw processing. I see ACDSee Pro constantly, but the features I'd like to see added are, I guess, just too "quirky" to ever make it into the product. One example: quite often, the last photo at an event or location that I take is really what I want to be the first of a set. The restaurant sign, the sign for the park I just walked through, etc. I seem to miss those things on the way in to a place, and all I want is a one-click way - or even a drag and drop method - to change all EXIF/file time stamps at once to be just prior to the first photo I took. Think of it as a time machine for photos. I can do this now of course, but it requires changing, at minimum, three EXIF fields. I'd find a feature like that to be quite useful - would you?

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

"Windows Vista introduced a modern and extensible imaging framework called Windows Imaging Component (WIC). The operating system comes with built-in support for several common image formats including jpeg, bmp, png, gif, tiff and HD Photo. WIC makes it possible for 3rd parties to add first-class support for image formats to Windows, complete with thumbnails in Explorer, preview and slideshow support in Photo Gallery / Photo Viewer and metadata search integration. The FastPictureViewer WIC RAW Codec Pack provides such platform support for additional formats and turns Windows Explorer into a raw viewer, through read-only image decoders, simultaneously available in both 32 and 64-bit flavor for Win7, Vista and XP SP3. The codec pack contains 32-bit and 64-bit NEF and 64-bit CR2 codecs, along with 64-bit DNG and a lot more!"

If you've ever had the frustration of looking at a folder full of raw photos and seeing no thumbnail preview, this is your solution. This amazing codec pack is donationware - meaning if you use it, you're encouraged to donate a few bucks to the author - and for me, it's definitely worth the donation I just made this morning. I work with raw files inside Lightroom for processing, but often I'll want to jump into a folder and see the raw images there, and with Windows 7 lacking support for raw files, this tool fills the gap perfectly. Definitely worth checking out!

Thursday, October 23, 2008

If you're a Lightroom user like me, you'll be interested to know that Adobe has released the first update to Lightroom 2.0. The 2.1 release is a 64.3 MB download that I installed quite quickly and easily. What does it add? According to the pop-up that appeared in the software when I manually checked for new updates: